As promised, I’ve performed the same analysis on the twenty-two pieces which will appear in Rocket Science. These charts probably say something about the type of fiction I like.

I’m not sure this chart actually demonstrates anything – it might well be that a submission stands a better chance of being bought if submitted later in the reading period, but I suspect the high number for October is simply a reflection of the higher number of submissions that month.

There is marginally higher percentage of women writers in Rocket Science than actually submitted to the anthology.

CA Canada, GB UK, No Norway, US USA

Rocket Scienceis a British anthology, so it’s hardly surprising that the contents should be mostly British – despite the fact that the majority of submissions came from the US. It’s not that the submissions from the UK were of a uniformly higher standard, but perhaps because the style of the British writers appealed to me more than that of many of the US writers. Also, many of the US submissions were what I classified as “traditional sf”, which is not what I was looking for.

I suspect the dominance of male protagonists is a result of the number of “space fiction” stories I bought for Rocket Science.

Lots of different countries are represented by the stories’ protagonist, so a diverse cast of characters.

No stories set outside the Solar System made the final cut – not because I decided FTL, or generation ships, were not “authentic or realistic” enough, but because those stories which did include them didn’t handle them in a way I felt suited the anthology (although that was not the sole reason I rejected those stories). I had expected the contents to be spread more evenly across the planets, but they appear to be mostly group around the Earth – Moon system.

I wanted a spread of modes of fiction for Rocket Science, though the guidelines described it as a hard sf anthology. I got my wish.

Happily, there’s no over-abundance of fix problem or you die Analog-type stories. Instead, there’s a nicely varied mix of types of story. And I hope the readers of Rocket Science will think so too, when they come to read it next year.